Briefly Noted

Lost Memory of Skin, by Russell Banks (Ecco; $25.99). Banks’s novel gets off to a slow start, introducing the Kid, a young sex offender—his tiny universe prescribed by an ankle bracelet—living with an enormous pet iguana in a shantytown of social outcasts under a causeway in South Florida. After the settlement is raided by police, a sociologist from the local university takes a somewhat sinister interest. The Kid knows almost nothing, unless it has to do with porn or iguanas; the Professor knows everything, and is in the habit of sharing that information, unprompted, with those around him. Yet Banks’s enormous gamble in both plot and character pays off handsomely, as we are coaxed into a wary affection for the alienated inhabitants of this world, and alarm over the plagues besetting them: the predations of the surveillance state, the despoliation of Florida, the nation’s enslavement to instant gratification. By the end, Kafka is rubbing elbows with Robert Ludlum, and Banks has mounted a thrilling defense of the novel’s place in contemporary culture.

Calling Mr. King, by Ronald De Feo (Other Press; $14.95). In this moody comedy, an American hit man’s admiration for a victim’s English country estate grows into a passion for European art and architecture that disrupts his career. The improbable plot moves through the museums, bookstores, and streets of London, New York, and Barcelona as the protagonist, between assignments, makes himself into a connoisseur. De Feo exploits the obvious potential for comedy but achieves a persuasive, even moving characterization. Whether pretending to be a British aristocrat in New York or unsentimentally confronting his dismal childhood, De Feo’s hit man is extremely likable, and the novel emerges as a study of the delights and dangers of reinvention.

Feeding on Dreams, by Ariel Dorfman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $27). This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help us “survive in the worst of times,” he admits, “but it cannot help us to live well.” Most trying for this self-styled Odysseus, and the narrative linchpin, is his return to Santiago, in 1990. It is a “mad miasma welcome,” and, for all his travails in exile, he realizes that the “safe space of expatriation” has made his voice “too loud” and presumptuous to “speak Chilean.” It is perhaps inevitable that such a testament to deracination suffers from a certain rootlessness; it opens, for instance, with the return to Chile, but we’re left to fill in for ourselves what Dorfman’s relationship to the country was like before he left it to become an advocate abroad.

What I Don’T Know About Animals, by Jenny Diski (Yale; $26). Neither fish nor fowl, Diski’s book is a compassionate, appealing crossbreed of history, philosophy, and memoir—“a kind of travel book but with animals instead of travel,” as she explains in a letter to a sheep farmer, whom she visits during lambing season. She studies elephants in Kenya, learns to horseback ride, and observes an Alzheimer’s researcher conducting experiments on chickens, in an attempt to confront “the massive black hole in our understanding of the creatures with whom we share the planet.” What are animals to us, and what are they to themselves? Technological advances—like the increasingly sleek and unobtrusive film equipment used to produce nature documentaries—may allow people to see more of animals, but can’t reveal how animals see people. Their “uncanny silence” fascinates, Diski argues, because it reminds us that “we can’t really know any other consciousness, not even those of our own species.”

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As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.